Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "A friend works as CIO at a medium sized publicly traded company. The company was contacted by a hacking group and told to pay $100,000 to prevent their company from being hacked/attacked. They actually paid the extortion (told authorities after). The authorities said the company could be charged with supporting Terrorists. Seeing that most publicly known hacks are costing companies this size nearly a million dollars, Is this supporting terrorists or supporting stockholders?"

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:—“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explainThat you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:—“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:—

“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”

Agreed. People need to stop throwing this word around willy-nilly, and get it through their heads that terrorism is a specific kind of crime: do what we demand (politically) or we'll start blowing people and things up.

If demands aren't made (generally in advance), then it's not terrorism, even if they blow something up. If they don't blow things up (or at least really conspire to do so), then it's not terrorism... it's just attempted extortion. Terrorism is generally something that threatens many people, not just a hostage... though I supposed you could call taking a political leader hostage to be a form of terrorism.

But the point is: broadly speaking, terrorism is a conspiracy to make political gains by means of threatening people en masse. It is pretty hard, though possible, for a single individual to qualify as an actual terrorist.

People seem to forget that in the 60s and early 70s, the US had a great many liberal political terrorists within its borders, who committed more bombings in the early 70s, in Washington DC alone, than all the "right-wing" terrorists since, combined.

Actually, Dane-geld comes from the Viking age.
A good example is that the French king paid the Danes to stop destroying Paris. So they took the money and left, only to come back later and ask for more money. So yes - paying Dane-geld does not get rid of the Dane...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld [wikipedia.org]

I would modify that strategy if necessary. Example:In the dark ages, the German King Henry I did have a problem with Hungarians who were in the habit of to looting and pillaging southern Germany. He paid them tribute for a few years, while building castles and city walls and raising militias. When he felt he was ready, he unilaterally reduced the yearly tribute to one (1) dead dog.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riade [wikipedia.org]